Literary Scene

Before opening Shya Scanlon’s In This Alone Impulse, the cover art is already setting the tone for his trapeze act with all the same tools any writer can find. It’s just that Scanlon has a certain ear, an instinct.

The cover is minimalistic – a gray background interrupted only by the title in red at the top left, Scanlon’s name in white at bottom left, and, just off-center, what is left of a broken pencil lead, along with a fast mark, hectic, rushed, something incomplete but with a breaking power. Something impulsive.

Inside are prose poems, each seven lines in length. With the first, “A Bargain,” Scanlon puts his style on the table for the reader to consider, easing him into the broken logic of language, of theme and tone, that will tie this book in a spider’s web, both beautiful and strong. Here is the writer offering us a “bargain” on something brand new in the canon of prose poetry.

“I have a house. I have a house. It is not my house that I have. It is not my house, anymore…A have now house about me anymore.”

The narrator could be trying to sell you the house, a good deal, a bargain. The narrator might just as well be talking about himself. But one thing is certain – we are in different hands, a writer taking a bold chance at the “word level.”

The reader may not at once adjust to Scanlon’s syntactic innovation. The risk is a practice in building trust, coming to know this author’s voice so the stories can be told in a way that only he could tell them.

A key thing found early on is the use of the second-person point of view. Throughout much of the book, with a handful of exceptions, this is employed. But not exclusively.

In stories such as “Six miles south” the former John Hawkes Fiction Prize winner also speaks of “we” and “I” within the same story, grouping them with the second-person “you.” In this story that decision gives the piece the feel of a letter, something shared among good friends or current enemies, those close conversations found only among people with knowledge of one another’s pain, happiness, hope.

In “Six miles south” these three points of view are wed and rightly so as there is a sadness of tone beneath the sharing, one of learning and of growth – all the ingredients of any close relationship.

“You said something new, and let me learn, and I passed this along, and passed it wider, a broken kind of wideness, a small and splintered thing. We sat together and watched it spread…”

But these are some of the technical aspects within this book and, though important, are almost secondary to the work as a whole. Brian Evenson says of IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE: “…there’s really nothing else out there like it.” It’s as true a thing said of a book in a long while. Whether it is with a surreal piece, such as “Skeleton clock” (I went into outer space this morning.) or a piece about longing and self-worth as with “Imagine next” (Erin, sugar biscuit, you took me in like you have now taken in a dog.) Scanlon is pushing an emotion off the page. And even in this, he moves easily from one form to another such as the straight-forward narrative approach in “Daresies: Backsies” or the linguistically experimental dialogue of “A neighboring insert.”

The best part of the trapeze act? The fact that never is the core of this book lost amid these risks and experimentation. Scanlon achieves across 59 prose poems not as much a linked storyline as a consistent feeling of something unmentioned but known to us all, the inner voices of our secret lives.

A Review of Shya Scanlon’s IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE was last modified: November 2nd, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

FIN SORREL is the founding editor of Mannequin Haus, a journal publishing surreal and innovative writing. I sent MH one of my footnote poems earlier this year with little hope that it would be accepted. I’ve written a handful of these kinds of poems over the past year and they’ve been roundly rejected across the board. I know they’re good poems and innovative in a way that’s interesting, so it had been really hard to get those particular rejections. But Fin accepted one and has since published it at MH. An editor willing to go places other editors won’t was immediately intriguing to me, so I was happy to talk with him about MH and more about his aesthetic and how he came up with it. The interview took place over the course of a week and, as far as I understand it, on his cell phone for Fin, for the most part.

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: Hey Fin. Buddy it’s good to get a chance to talk with you. I feel journals like Mannequin Haus and a handful of others are the lifeblood of literature right now. Fiction and poetry has never moved an inch forward or in any interesting direction at all by playing it safe and moving away from the risks. Any writer or any journal doing this, working the front lines of change and innovation, has my immediate attention and loyalty. How much of this kind of thinking was at play for you when starting the journal?

FIN SORREL: A ton of thinking about the literary norm, the accepted status quo, and formalities had made me very angry as I cautiously, and with great disdain, began sending out my first book. Ten years prior, writing for me was an escape from the status quo, (I was reading Les Chants de Maldoror and living on the street, it was not a business, it was my passion, another an act of creation, just like painting was, or drawing. I was not as much the authority (or author) but something else, the wizard, casting long, aimless spells of reality-bending- surrealism like in Teacup Galaxy, a story I wrote during that time period, which is being released in a collection from Pski Porch Press in October. That story is a good example of how I approached the conversation with the literary underground world. As the rejections poured in for the first ten years, I realized I had to tighten up my style, or go back to painting, and normalize my experiments, if I wasn’t very strong, this would have killed me. I might have given up, and I think this is a real danger with some these journals, they are trying to act all coy, they act unapproachable, kind of reminds me of a yuppie attitude, looking down on a homeless man or woman. I saw a whole platform for the elite, and powerful, and rich. I felt the underrepresented people of this country and the world needed a journal they could send their weirdest, most ridiculous out of control, surreal writing to and have acceptance. That is why I started Mannequin Haus.

SLC: That’s an amazing reason for starting a journal, to give voice to the under-represented in the literary world. So you’ve went a level further than indie and started focusing on the underground, which is great. I’ve most frequently thought along these lines when considering journals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, etc. You’re not getting into to those places unless you meet certain strange criteria. I say strange, because exposure shouldn’t really depend on having already been exposed. But there is certainly a level of this sort of thing in the lower tier journals. So what if Mannequin Haus received a submission from George Saunders? Would you give him serious consideration or would you actually prefer work from new writers doing new things with new tools, so to speak? And, building on that question, what is the near perfect or perfect submission for you as an editor?

FS: If George Saunders submitted something to us, I’d probably be interested only if his work showed me something curious. Personally, I am a fairly moody reader, some days I want to read ancient Chinese fiction, and some days I want to read Harmony Korine. I publish a lot of authors who are experimenting with formatting, and I really enjoy seeing some new spin on how an author tells a story or presents a scene in a play, the voice they choose, diction, and I do really look for experimental authors who are breaking any of the rules. I get a lot of submissions from people who consider what they are doing experimental, and it is not anything of the sort, I also get a lot of stuff where people think cruel scenes of violence is surreal, I don’t normally take these kinds of things, unless the work can somehow reveal both sides. A perfect submission would be something that pushes the reader outside of themselves, and takes them to a new place. I really like the work Kobo Abe, and I would love to publish an author who is doing something similar to what he was doing. I’ve yet to see that.

SLC: I read Kobo Abe earlier this year (The Woman in the Dunes) and didn’t care for it very much. But I’m eager to read The Box Man. I feel like I was maybe in the wrong head space to read him at the time. I did enjoy his style, though. What aspects of his work are you thinking of when you say “doing something similar” for writers out there working? And building on that thought, do you think innovation in writing comes from experimentation or more from a sense of originality?

FS: I guess I shouldn’t name drop too much here. I haven’t read The Woman in the Dunes, but I saw the movie, and it wasn’t the best. I read The Box Man, and I loved it. A Face of Another is also good. Kangaroo Notebook was my favorite. I feel like authors today hide behind their voice, they maybe milk it too long. It’s interesting to see someone who can write many different styles, blending them together. I guess they call this a hybrid, which I like. It’s like a mixed media painting, art work. I request literary art writing in my submission page, so I call it literary art, but hybrid is similar, I suppose. Innovation in writing comes out in quite a few different forms. Sometimes it is from a life in academia, personal study, or diy. But the point is the innovations usually come way after the experimental stages, when an author has tried all the known styles and can now come into their work knowing how the will approach. Others may be natural story tellers, who once they can create a flow working with equipment like computers, recording devices, can delve deep into subterranean worlds and take us on wild rides. There are some who cannot see their work become too absurd, who create this other kind of absurd that is so close to reality that it almost breaks us in two, choosing which reality that we need to occupy.

SLC: That sounds really interesting, an absurd that is so close to reality it almost breaks us in two. What are some examples of work like this? If there are certain writers you’re thinking of, who are they? Do you have any links to their work you could include here? In regard to the second question, you are the one and only editor who has accepted for publication one of my footnote poems, the poem “Psychedelic Death Shroud” and for that I’m eternally grateful. I had given up on those poems (I have others and am working on a collection of them now) finding homes due to rejections that had piled up. Do you actively seek out work that seems innovative to the point of strange?

FS: I don’t actively seek out much work. When Cassidy Rios Kane was on board as editor, he did actively troll the internet in search of some of the most amazing authors. I leave it up to authors to approach me, but there is a rare case when I will approach an author, requesting submissions. I do, though, look for in people’s submissions, for something a bit amiss, something off in it. Something vulnerable, and strange and human.

PILL COLLAGE 2017 By FIN SORREL

SLC: At what point will innovative writing require a return to traditional forms and concepts? Or do you feel this circular tendency doesn’t apply to literature?

FS: I think it returns to traditional forms all of the time, and will most likely always do so. I think in anything there is a point where you get to diminishing returns, and a lot of experimental writing can risk this danger, I enjoy writing that follows some kind of theme, but goes off into many unsettling areas and returns in a way back to the place, I feel like there is a danger to go off the rails and lay there crashed. Instead of getting back on the line. The end, end of story, I find this to be a bit of a waste of time, and energy, but it happens to me personally in my writings all of the time. There is always this idea for me that I am having fun with it, so there are no risks, just the act of writing or not writing. If I am not writing, why should I beat myself up, I am not interested, do not have a plan, or the energy, if I am writing, why should I always push myself to make something like a Hollywood movie, or a Stephen King story if that is not how I write, I mean if I cannot get published so be it, I will continue to write no matter what.

SLC: Tell me a little about the first few months operating Mannequin Haus, the early stages, those first few weeks reading submissions. At what point did submissions begin matching the aesthetic?

FS: My first call was an awfully quick return, everyone in my circle is pretty odd, so it makes sense. I was staying with friends in a hotel room in Biloxi, Mississippi, basically draining off the gambling world, for free rooms and drinks, buffets, we had it made for a week. After three years of traveling, this was much needed down time, and I had already been getting submissions, Anyway, they have these free printers and computers that you can use if you’re a guest at the hotel, so I printed out my manuscript for Caramel floods, (Pski Porch Press, 2017) and built the first issue of Mannequin Haus. They tried to kick me out, the security thought I was a vagrant who had wandered in and was using the computers, which I essentially was, but not this time. I had a room number and they had to apologize to me personally, that was how i knew this would all work out in the end.

SLC: How often do you work closely with submitting writers on aspects of their work before publication? It seems editing is a disappearing art in the independent lit world. Do you accept a piece that shows promise but might need a little editorial guidance? And lastly, do you traffic in form rejections?

FS: I do not use rejections, I simply accept or you do not hear back, (unless I lost the email, this means I cannot use your work). I hate getting rejections, it slows my wave of madness. Creative intentions have a flow; rejections are a waste of time, and a waste of words in my opinion. I don’t want to do that to others. they will find publication somewhere, on their way to the top, if they send out only one thing at a time, I wouldn’t want to break someone’s heart, because it breaks mine to see half of the journals reject my voice. Timing is a big thing. If I have a ton of time and an author requests to work on their piece with me, I would be more than happy to help, or add my two cents, but no one has really done that yet.

An Absurd So Close To Reality: An Interview with Mannequin Haus Editor Fin Sorrel was last modified: September 16th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

My general thoughts about the Best Small Fictions series are probably no secret. I’ve called both BSF 2015 and BSF 2016 the most important books published in their respective years.

This year is no different.

The most important book published this year is now and will prove to be Best Small Fictions 2017.

Now that’s we’ve established that once again, I will say this year has been a particularly good year for flash fiction. The New Yorker has decided to publish flash stories throughout the summer (though some of those stories beg the question as to whether The New Yorker and those of us writing flash fiction actually agree on what constitutes the form). This year, BSF series editor Tara L. Masih worked with a writer who is arguably one of the best ever at this beautiful and supremely difficult form, the astonishing Amy Hempel. Hempel herself has said this of the series: “[T]his striking new series…has quickly become essential reading.”

Yes, it has, Amy.

This year the selections are as strong as ever. The usual cast is present with veteran flash fiction authors such as Scott Garson, Jen Knox, Randall Brown, and Sherrie Flick, among others, while also peppering in some iconic short-short form writers like Joy Williams, Stuart Dybek, and Robert Scotellaro. But don’t let these big names and longtime flash writers lead you too far afield from the others included in BSF this year. The talent is spread around.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s story “The Sea Urchin” was the first story to stop me in my tracks this year. First published at Paper Darts, Cancio-Bello takes what could be a basic memory from childhood and creates a picture perfect example of flash fiction, employing nearly all the usual techniques in the most delightful ways, beginning with that always important first line: “Grandmother kept a diver’s knife strapped to her thigh.”

She continues the story and gives the reader a marriage of the beautiful and practical, along with strange tradition and other-worldliness.

“On my birthday, she brought me a ball of spines in a bucket, lifted its bit of ocean into my cupped hands. The creature’s round mouth explored the cracks of my palm, tasting the salt on my skin, recoiling. An offering like the pincushions I often brought my mother, every needle threaded with a different color. Grandmother boiled garlic, soybeans, salt into broth, ladled the seaweed soup into a white bowl. She turned the urchin and broke it open, scooped out the ocher roe with a spoon, dropped it in among the kelp.”

Another story as deserving for inclusion in this year’s edition is the flash piece “Silent Hill” by Ras Mashramani, originally published in Pank. Mashramani takes a Playstation game from the late 1990s and creates a flashback world to when the character lost herself in the game while escaping a world in which her father was dying.

“There was a first generation Playstation video game about a young father who lost his child in a town where it snowed ash. Together you stumbled through foggy whiteness in the creature infested streets looking for her. Some early mornings you passed out in front of the living room TV screen watching hidden monsters behind your eyelids, ash in your hair, a fire burning forever underground. For so long it had been you and your father just like in the game running from stuccoed apartment to stuccoed apartment.”

We are firmly placed in this world of father and daughter, both in the context of the video game and also the reality of the story. And when we find later on that the character finds herself allowing a boy much older than her named Marquise to live out a young lapgirl fantasy while she loses herself in the game, it’s both a revealing and a supremely sad moment. But more than that it’s a brilliant technique and wholly original, even for a form that is innately original in nearly any and all concepts of fiction. When a story stands out in such a way, it’s no surprise to find it between the covers of BSF.

“You did this on the point of Marquise’s knee, engrossed in game play, addicted to the focused labored attention of a teenaged boy with sexual behavior issues and the fear of the screen, the fear of touch, wanting the fear, flattening all the affect and focusing it into this character, the Father, and his quest for his kid in this ghost town, and it was hard to disentangle Silent Hill from Paramount, California, and the neglected section 8 pool and automatic gates that made up the Sierra Gardens apartment complex.”

This year’s edition of BSF is a clear indication that the series is nowhere near a slowing down point, but is, instead, gaining momentum and prestige throughout the world of literature. When the history of flash fiction as a vital form is told, Best Small Fictions and Masih will be in the opening chapter. Of this there should be no doubt.

A Review of Best Small Fictions 2017 was last modified: August 13th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

I won’t spend too much time talking about when Marcus was Finnegan Flawnt, but you should know that Marcus was once a writer on the indie scene that other indie lit writers couldn’t talk enough about. He was like Basquiat in the 1980s New York art scene. He still is, it’s only now there’s that asterisk there under the conversation with that cool pseudonym. Like Basquiat, he is talented, charming, completely original, and when working under the pen name, mysterious without being in your face with it. He’s a natural, you know?

Over the past several years, he’s receded a bit, back to Berlin and his primary work of being a genius in other fields of study (yes, Marcus is bonafide that way. My daughter could possibly still believe he alone invented the internet, in fact). But let’s move along to his most recent achievement, the historical novel-in-flash Gisela, recently published by Folded Word Press.

Based on the historical queen and later saint Gisela of Hungary, Gisela, the book, bloomed in Marcus’s mind (that’s how I imagine it happening, blooming) from the idea of this influential woman who history forgot or, at best, made a footnote. How would the many pieces fit together, and how could he, Marcus, combine them to magical ends?

The end result is a beautifully crafted set of short pieces that can both stand on their own as exacting and fully realized works of literature but also, when laced together by Marcus’s skilled hands, become a full structure that is, for me, literally breathtaking, in that I seriously discovered myself holding my breath while reading at least half a dozen times throughout. For instance in sections such as one titled “The Witches” the reader feels as much under a spell as any character presented in the text. Here’s an excerpt:

“Gerbert, by the window, shuddered; his mouth contorted. The witch began to twist faster and faster while her twin was talking to Gisela, mumbling to her, marching old holy words straight through the child’s ear into her skull, where they entered the bloodstream and looked for the enemy. The monk’s fingers twitched in the same rhythm and he found himself falling into a trance. He knew it would be dangerous to witness the witches brewing and dancing but there was an energy in it that he’d missed badly since he’d been asked to educate the young princess. Gerbert didn’t even notice when the hags stopped, tucked the girl in, rubbed the concoction on her lips and left for the unseen place from which they had come. Gisela healed quickly thereafter: The fever fell that same night and she asked for solid food the next morning. She had no memory of what had happened, but when she bounced on one leg across the meadow in the castle yard, she chanted a little melody that had not been heard in church, an odd melody that made Gerbert’s ears prick up because he sensed the uncanny in it.”

To my mind (and I’ve read everything that Marcus has written that I’m aware is out there) this novel surpasses anything he’s accomplished to this point. It is no mind whether you have an interest in history or, in truth, even literature. Reading Gisela is to be fully enchanted, and that is the rarest of all states for any writer to place a reader. It may be the writer’s greatest achievement. Marcus set an extraordinary goal for himself in this and never faltered. We’re all richer for his effort and success.

An Appreciation of Marcus Speh’s GISELA was last modified: August 11th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

My purchase of Heather’s poetry collection Sullivan’s Waiting for an Answer set the record, I think. I saw it on my Facebook feed at let’s say 8:17 p.m. I owned the eBook edition at let’s say 8:24 p.m.

I would have gotten the hard copy, but I was eager. And my book buying funds were wiped out about three weeks ago. These are the facts as presented. Here are some more facts.

I’m a fan of Heather’s poetry and with this, her debut collection, I was, yes, eager, to say the least. What I found was a heartfelt collection full of talent and composure that took on the powerful topics of love and family and loss and parenting and childhood with an ease that has been, to my eye, unmatched.

The poems are written sincerely and from a place of awe or contentment or some kind of cosmic blessing the rest of us have yet to experience. When Heather trains her poetic vision on the present day of say her children or the seaside town she now calls home, the reader wants to be there with her, feel all the moments along with her. She does this with words, sentences, lines. And in poems that explore a childhood that immediately intones a past with more shadows and perhaps more jagged learning curves that will later feed the seaside present, Heather never falters with the same composure and talent. What is best about what is given up to the reader of these poems is simply everything Heather has to give that is best about her heart and her mind.

Waiting for an Answer is less a debut poetry collection and more a culmination of one incredibly strong person’s inner awakening to a life lived with integrity in the face of hardship and a philosophy built on family and built to last for all time. When a poet gives you that kind of book, you pay attention.

The Appreciation of Heather Sullivan’s WAITING FOR AN ANSWER was last modified: August 6th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

Timothy Gager is a fantastic poet. I’d like to say this up front. And I say that for everyone. To my mind, and I could be off base in mentioning this, but I seem to think he may go unnoticed too often for his poetry. Reading his most recent collection, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, I’ve become convinced he could be one of our most natural poets. His poems have this feel to them, as if they appeared to him in visions. In truth, I realize this only means he worked on them extraordinarily hard. But still, not everyone can bring across this natural feel in their work.

Take this from Act I, the first of eight sections of poems from the collection, a piece titled “Repatriation”:

It’s still happening, now, as science, debunked their tall talethat I wasn’t really a native American,not a cultural item of lineal descendantssee what they dug up, check the DNA which shows, I still long to be in the ground.

Timothy spends a good deal of time at the beginning of this collection dealing with justice and injustice, especially in regard to the native American. In his preface, he explains that his perspective on the treatment of the native American was changed following a failed grade school assignment. He spends time on the subject in the title poem, as well, Chief Jay Strongbow, a former pro wrestler who used a racist gimmick, a popular show technique for those guys in the 1980s. But he doesn’t stay on the subject, instead moving on to topics ranging from the complexities of love to the hardships of addiction.

In the poem “Sobriety” with stripped down language and minimal space, Gager absolutely sums up one of many aspects of what staying clean is like, the hourly grind of it and how beautiful recovery can be when managed successfully. The poem begins with a familiar image, the addict or alcoholic in recovery with coffee. In this instance, sitting alone in thought, viewing oil paintings.

But more than what he can do with a ripe subject matter, and returning to this natural rhythm his style develops on the tongue, it is his use of syntax that can astound in this collection. Of the many poems on display, none show this more clearly for me than “Nursery Rhythms.” Have a look at the final stanza and consider while reading how Timothy must have labored over each syllable working in perfect concert with the other.

off my crooked claviclesapiens discern vertebrae unbreakable, resilient missiled. And shatterproof glass in pitched little houses is how we wind up a catapult.

Big Table Publishing just released this title. I suggest you get to Amazon and get a copy as soon as possible. BTP will have it available at their site soon, I’m sure. In the meantime, know that Timothy is writing poetry that is not only pleasing on a poetic level but is also important on a social level, aware of long-standing debts and the newly-wronged alike and poetry that offers wisdom shared beautifully, not something found easily or often. And he shares this asking nothing in return but your attention.

An Appreciation of Timothy Gager’s CHIEF JAY STRONGBOW IS REAL was last modified: August 1st, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

To begin with I somehow deleted my Goodreads Reading Challenge a few weeks back. But I still have the count going and the books I’ve read are there on the profile. I have no idea how I did it, so I can’t really give an informed warning to anyone in the hope they may avoid such a thing. Maybe just don’t fuck with it. I can’t even remember what I was trying to do. In any case, here’s my second installment of my Goodreads year.

To begin with I have to say the best book I’ve read so far this year was Michael Robbins’s Alien vs. Predator. It was the first poetry collection I had read since finishing Denton Loving’s Crimes Against Birds last year. Mr. Robbins is a genius. I read nearly every poem out loud to someone, and each and every person I read them to absolutely adored them. I’ve never experienced a person’s work have that kind of effect on so many different people. The poems are formally structured for the most part and as far from formal in language and subject matter as a poet could possibly get. I really have no idea how he did this, but I can say that I’m basically mystified and inspired by the achievement. Read this collection. And his second collection The Second Sex is nearly as good. Read them both and be changed.

Here’s the other books I’ve read at this point in the year:

Visions by Troy James Weaver – I’ve been following Troy’s trajectory for a couple of years now and though I liked Marigold better than this one there was still that voice that is distinctly Troy’s in this one. I’m looking forward to what he does next.

Naked Friends by Justin Grimbol – This was a fun book but not much happened that had a solid reason. But I have to be honest, I was fine with that. It was a guided decent with some nice surprises.

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox by Lee Klein – In about 2008 I received my one and only rejection letter from Lee Klein. I really wanted in Eyeshot but after that rejection I never sent again. I wish now I would have read more of the rejections he had posted there. After reading this book of selected Eyeshot rejections I can see clearly that Lee only ever had the best intentions, as can be seen in how much time he spent thinking about and sharing his thoughts with the writers in his response letters. If all editors spent as much time doing this we’d all be better off.

Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje – Behold my favorite writer. And also the first book of his poetry I’ve ever read. I didn’t care much for it. I saw what he was doing with the collection but I simply wasn’t interested. I felt bad about that. Still do.

Nothing is Strange by Mike Russell – This was a fun read. Inventive and innovative, and I now intend to read more of Mike’s books. He also has his own publishing thing going and it puts out books of fabulism and surrealism, etc.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson – This book had been on my radar (or rather all over the radar in general) for as long as I’ve been kicking around the indie scene. I finally got my hands on a copy at Barnes & Noble in Lexington and I’ll say that it reminded me of Anne Carson’s Beauty of the Husband a little bit, which is a fine thing, of course. But I’ll say Nelson makes the color blue her own, and there are clear and present moments of genius. I read it fast because it was good, though I’m still working to fully understand the immense hype.

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery by Tim Earley – I read the very first poem in this magnificent collection and went instantly to social media and proclaimed with excitement that Tim Earley is the best poet writing today. I stand behind that statement now and it’ll take a poet that surpasses Keats to change my mind. But minds can be changed, mind you.

The Second Sex by Michael Robbins – Like I said, this one wasn’t as good as A vs. P but it was Robbins and it’s still amazing. His book of literary criticism comes out in a couple weeks. Buying it soon as it’s available.

Whim Man Mammom by Abraham Smith – I like the idea of Abraham Smith as a poet and, from what I’ve seen of him as a person who is a poet, he seems to be a cool guy. I saw pictures of him reading his latest poetry collection at Third Man Records about a week ago. Him and the whole scene looked turbo cool. But alas, I did not like this collection. I can appreciate what he was doing with language, but it nearly inaccessible. I’ll keep reading his work, though. I feel like there’s something great there.

EOB: Earth Out of Balance by John Minichillo – This was a turbo fun read. Smart, innovative, deep while still cool. John has always published really tight work, but this one is tight as bark on a tree. Future days with all notions of culture and social class turned on its head with some depleted resources thrown in for good measure. You honestly can’t go wrong with this book. And when I bought it the price was ridiculously low.

Paris Blues by Charles Baudelaire – It’s Baudelaire. I mean what more do I need to say. If you have an interest in poetry at all, this is one of the greats and someone you pretty much have to take into account. In Paris Blues we get some of the first prose poetry ever written. And it’s still among the best of all time.

The Devil’s Trill by Ron Houchin – Ron is a really good friend of mine. And also one of the best poets in all of Appalachia. With this book, he now proves he’s also a contender for one of the best young adult authors from the area. This horror novel that casts a group of scrappy kids in the shared, heroic lead is everything you’d hope it would be. I had the seriously amazing privilege to write a blurb for it, which goes: “Ron Houchin’s The Devil’s Trill is a thrilling and splendidly horrifying tale. But, beyond even that, it’s the story of a hardscrabble group of kids who face the impossible and, in doing so, discover a new kind of strength through friendship. It’s a real gift that Houchin has turned his poetic eye to the inner lives of these children and all they have to teach us about loyalty and courage. I had an absolute blast reading this book.“

On Broad Sound by Rusty Barnes – A book by another good friend. On Broad Sound is Rusty’s sort of love collection to his adopted New England home. Another Appalachia boy, he has written literature of that region and poetry as good as anyone for decades now. Recently turning his pen to crime novels, he’s doing wonderful work there. But On Broad Sound, in my honest opinion, is the best thing he’s written to this point.

Tinderbox Lawn by Carol Guess – This book made me want to write prose poetry. I’m convinced it would make anyone who reads it, writer or not, want to write prose poetry. I’ve looked at her other titles and I’m not sure I’d enjoy them as much, but this one should be a prose poetry classic.

Alright, let’s keep reading. Let’s be better readers. Let’s remind all of them (whoever they may be) that the world is made up of stories and that’s perfectly okay. Here’s what Bolaño says about it all: “Reading is more important than writing.”

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me, Arielle. Let’s start with how I first got to know you, through your online lit journal Fair Folk. It’s a journal that, for my money, really seeks to find the imaginative in storytelling today. Share a little about the journal and also about how did the idea for it started for you? Where do you see it going in the coming years?

ARIELLE TIPA: Fair Folk began as an “I know this has already been done before, but I’m gonna do it anyway” type of thing, since there are thousands and thousands of lit journals out there seeking out similar content. The fantasy genre has always been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, both in film and in literature. I was obsessed with series like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper and The Unicorn Chronicles by Bruce Coville, and my favorite movies included Thumbelina and The Neverending Story. I was always that weird kid who scoured through the (pitifully small) mythology section of a Catholic school library just for fun. As I grew older, I began to question why people were so enthralled with the mystical concept of being or even existing, as well as the complexity of what it is to be human, and speculative fiction was really the only collective genre which echoed my own curiosities. Fair Folk, all in all, really stemmed from this attraction to the enchanted and the unknown, which still grows with me today.

I never had the courage to submit to literary journals until late last year, and that was very much a catalyst for developing Fair Folk – it was almost as if I wanted to do something worthwhile during my waiting period of getting a “yay” or “nay” for my lit journal submissions. To be honest, I was very insecure while starting this journal, since I really couldn’t consider myself a published writer (I really wasn’t, save for some contributive articles). But, I realized that starting Fair Folk wasn’t about me. It all boiled down to sharing diverse voices of speculative fiction, and yes, it does seek to find imaginative storytelling, which is needed now more than ever as the world today seems to sink further into a lecherous love affair with political chaos and correctness. The journal seeks out not only escapism, but a temporary alternative to reality. I believe a story is only worth reading if we are able to forget our own for just a short while, which is essentially Fair Folk’s purpose.

In the coming years, I hope to see the journal doing what it has been doing since its inception, and then some. Do I see it becoming more successful? Absolutely. Do I see it going into print? Maybe not. I have been (to an insurmountable degree) honored by having the chance to read some of the greatest spec fiction by international writers which both adheres to and shies away from the mainstream, and I cannot wait for more submissions to pile up. Being an editor-in-chief (as some will agree) is very rewarding.

COMPTON: Of course I agree that there needs to be a little more imagination in today’s fiction and poetry and, well, everything else, really. It’s a worthy goal, I think.

It’s interesting you should mention that you’re not really seeing Fair Folk becoming a print journal. In addition to the fact that realism has sort of had its day, so to speak, I also think the same can nearly be said of the print journal. I can remember hoping to get into a print publication back when I first starting writing, thinking, of course then, that it was more esteemed. I’m of a completely different mindset today. Print doesn’t begin to compete with online in terms of readership. And readership is the whole point, I believe. So Fair Folk remaining on online venue to me seems like the perfect situation. We need more of those, not less. Who needs another print journal that takes 437 days to reply to your submission and only accepts stories via snail mail. Man oh man, those days are way over in my book. What are your thoughts?

TIPA: Although I really, really prefer to read books in print, since it’s more intimate and concrete that way, my preference for literary journals is the complete opposite. Because content on the internet seems to be so much more easily accessible (and affordable) nowadays, the reason why I’d prefer the journal to stay immortalized through pixels and magical data is pretty much a no-brainer. As far as this modern, new-agey kind of era of reading, I really admire digital platforms like issuu, where you basically have the best of both worlds – a virtual print publication. I may (may) consider converting Fair Folk into virtual print and make it more like a seasonal type of publication. For now, WordPress is the easiest and most affordable option.

COMPTON: Let’s talk about your own writing. You were mentored by literary folklorist Ruth B. Bottigheimer at Stony Brook University. How did that experience bring you to the type of work you do today, especially in terms of the stories and so forth that focus on, in your own words, “fabulist to feminist, macabre to bizarre.” How much of that kind of writing did you bring to Stony Brook with you?

TIPA: To be honest, I barely even wrote anything besides scholarly papers while studying for my B.A. I was basically in starvation mode as far as writing for fun rather than for grades. I studied Comparative Literature and English, so the material I was required to read was extremely diverse: philosophical texts, cultural theories, biographies, nonfiction, sci-fi, Shakespeare, Freud, the works. While reading to get my degree, I was also, of course doing the usual – blogging, writing rough drafts, and leisure-reading on the side, and that same leisure reading included my personal favorites: fairy tales and dark fantasy, appropriately. This ultimately led to me into gathering ideas for my research project.

I ended up getting paired with this Professor Bottigheimer by the head of the Comp. Lit department and was like “Oh, cool…..who is she?” I then proceeded to Google her name at home, and basically lost it at “She has been hailed as ‘one of America’s foremost Grimm scholars’”. I became so intimidated that my anxiety was at an all-time high during the 4-month period of writing this gargantuan research project. But, meeting and working with her was rewarding. We ended up coming to an agreement for me to read and research the tales of the Grimm Brothers and Giambattista Basile, and to write a lengthy, comparative analysis of their usage of bird and tree imagery in as far as gendered functions and so on. That experience with Bottigheimer very much encouraged me to continue this obsession with writing and the fantasy genre, and to use it to the best of my abilities no matter what odd job I’m getting paid to do.

COMPTON: That is fantastic. I am now inspired to go back and read all the Grimm Brothers material. Dig deeply, you know?

So what’s coming up in the future for Arielle Tipa. What are some of you serious plans and then what are some of your pie-in-the-sky plans. For instance, my serious plans are to finish a collection of poetry and a third collection of stories by the end of the year. My fantasy plan is to retire from the day job, move to Norway, and write and play guitar for the next twenty years or so.

TIPA: Well, it’s been a while since we last have spoken, and a lot has changed in such a short period of time. I’ve been unemployed since last October, and these last six months have been some of the worst I’ve been through. But, I recently got a job as a full-time fashion and music writer for a small publication on Long Island. I love it so far, and I feel so fortunate to (finally) get paid to do what I love. I actually gained interest in fashion writing three years ago, and it became something I wanted to hone and delve deeper into. Since then, I’ve contributed for a few small sites, and I love that I get to incorporate my literary and poetic impulses into this type of journalism. This is a big leap for me and a stepping stone for my career, since I’ve wanted to work for some type of publication since community college, whether it was focused on fashion or music or any of the arts in general. Of course, I’ll still be writing poetry and short stories in-between.

As for my pet project, Fair Folk, I was recently thinking of making it into what I like to call an “inheritance” publication. That is, I would like to eventually step down as EIC and pass it down to someone I find worthy *queue villainous laughter*. Because I’m working now and have less down time, I would like to publish a few more stories and poems for Fair Folk until I feel that my time has come to an end. I’m currently tweeting updates as they come.

Lastly, I am also (as you, Mr. Compton, already know) working on a small, in-between endeavor of translating every Marilyn Manson song into Shakespearean. Seriously, like, straight-up Elizabethan stuff. Except it’s Marilyn Manson. I guess this would count as my pie-in-the-sky plan, but with the artist’s permission (followed by giddy and tearful fangirl reactions, since there is a personal, emotion connection I have with his music), I would like to publish these translations into print. Imagine that. Just imagine a printed discography of Manson’s songs bounded in tanned leather or sheepskin. If that’s not NYT #1 Bestseller material right there, then I don’t know what is.

A FOLKLORE OF FICTION: An Interview with Arielle Tipa was last modified: May 2nd, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: Really happy to have the chance to talk with you, Hugo. Thanks for taking the time. I want to start with your story “The Ritual.” I was proud as hell to get the chance to publish that at The Airgonaut the summer of last year. It tore me down in the best way possible. I knew right away I was in the hands of an extraordinary imagination. Do you mind starting with how that story took shape?

HUGO ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ: It’s really an honor to me! I’ve always found that my fiction is a little bit weird and a little bit strange and when The Airgonaut gave me a chance I felt like I finally had that validation. On to the story! It’s really what happens when you get one particularly strong image and have it chug a whole lot of Julio Cortazar. In this case, the image was that of a diving board at a swimming pool I used to visit when I was a kid. I might have jumped from it once, but just once, and what I remember the most was how high it was, and the paint chipping off the blue metal rungs leading up to the platform. There wasn’t a diving board, either, just an elevated platform. The image stuck with me for a long time after, in a little folder in my head of random and disconnected images.

A few years ago, as a student at the UTEP’s online MFA program, I had the fortune of having Daniel Chacón as both professor and thesis advisor because he exposed me to the works of Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges and the power of magic realism, where the line between the real and the fantastical could be blurred to create the most powerful images and stories. One particular story we covered in class sticks out: Cortazar’s La autopista del sur. What Cortazar does with the concept of time and place in that story basically told me: “You want to get weird? Let’s get weird.”

So I wrote an entire manuscript with those ideas, with my heart set on releasing a book that would put me in a literary space somewhere between Raymond Carver, Neil Gaiman, and Sandra Cisneros. But The Ritual, for all its weirdness, didn’t feel like it belonged there. Once I made the edits to the manuscript, it was the first story removed. Coincidentally, the second story removed from the manuscript eventually became This Nocturne of Misplaced Questions, published by The Airgonaut earlier this year.

But on to “The Ritual”even after I had made some more edits free from the constraint of continuity or of the manuscript, something was not quite there. It wasn’t until I heeded the call for submissions from The Airgonaut that I realized what my problem with the story was. It wasn’t what I wasn’t saying, but rather what I was saying, and using the sharp 1,000-word cut-off requirement, I took a scalpel and removed all the excess fat from the story, resulting in what you see now. My belief with “The Ritual” was that there should be an emphasis on the real part of magic realism, where there was more creativity invested in writing something concrete than in something ethereal, vague, and abstract.

To sum it up “The Ritual”came about as a vivid image frozen in time bolstered by learning about magic realism and then using a scalpel to remove unnecessary detail in a weird story that’s both an ode to the Latino greats that influenced me and an introduction letter to the literary world broadcasting that I’m going to bring the weirdness.

COMPTON: I like that – an introduction letter. It has the feel of a story that is announcing something important, the arrival of a genuine storyteller. You mention some of the Latino influences such as Borges (who I’ve read extensively) and Cortazar (who I have not read at all, as of yet). I wonder when writing in proximity to these huge shadows of magical realism and innovation how does a writer manage to create his own voice and his own style, and so on? It’s clearly something you’ve managed to do very well. I only wonder was there a great deal of effort that went into it or were you able to open up in original ways without much problem?

RODRIGUEZ: I have kind of a simple view on things like that. I don’t see it as daunting or intimidating. I see what’s been done by people like those two and I think to myself: “Wow, that’s really cool! Now how can I do something like that with my own twist?”

It goes beyond those writers I mentioned and extends to poets and journalists and songwriters and what they’re able to do with words. That’s what inspires me and gives me the fuel to figure out the how to make my voice unique. And to answer that question, I think I benefit from an outsider’s approach. I only started writing literary fiction in 2013 and then only because it was part of my Advanced Fiction Writing workshop. Before that, the bulk of my writing experience came from six semesters as a journalist for my alma mater, angsty online journals, and writing bad genre fiction and even worse fanfiction. So you take that and then you add the fact that my main social circle isn’t writers or poets but rather accountants, engineers, IT professionals, and teachers and you get a guy who has no idea what rules and norms The Literary Establishment™ has set and decides to instead carve out his own place. That comes easy to me. The effort and the real fun*, I think, comes from the trial-and-error figuring out which inspiration will work with which weird/vivid imagery. I compare this to cooking, another hobby I go into with the same reckless abandon. Sometimes the idea will work, like the years-long process that’s helped me develop the best gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. Sometimes the idea will crash and burn spectacularly, like the time I thought adding marinara sauce to ramen would be a good idea.

It wasn’t, and the effort resulted in the next two hours being spent in complete misery, but it was still fun attempting it.

*writers have quite the masochistic view of fun.

COMPTON: You say angsty online journals. I feel like I can relate. An online journal should be the rebel torch in the literary darkness right now, I think. Not a throw-away jumble of hasty ideas spread all over the place. Can you expand on what you mean and also share your thoughts on online work in general, especially as opposed to the increasingly uptight world of print?

RODRIGUEZ: Oh, to clarify, I meant angsty online personal journal sites, such as Xanga. However, there is one thing in common that those monuments to my teenage angst have with stories I’ve seen published: self-serving, navel-gazing bullshit. Not that there isn’t great work out there, because there is, plenty of it, but I feel like it gets buried in mountains of stories about sad people feeling sad about sad things.

Last year, I briefly worked as an assistant editor for the literary magazine Bartleby Snopes and one of the things that I loved the most about it, besides the fantastic people I got to work with, was that they weren’t afraid to push into the weird to get awesomely engaging stories. Editor Nate Tower had set a few submission guidelines for things that we would be wary of: “Stories written in present tense (especially third person present tense); stories with graphic dead baby scenes; stories about writers; stories about struggling marriages; stories set in bars; stories with more backstory than plot; stories with undeveloped characters; stories that are overly reflective; and stories that rely heavily on second person usage.”

It didn’t mean we weren’t going to publish stories that had some of those things, it just meant that writers should take risks and Bartleby was going to do its best to take away as many crutches as they could from those who submitted. That’s how the final issue’s dialogue contest winners included stories-in-dialogue about: a Godzilla-like monster who recited haikus; two men talking about pillows; two AIs talking at a bar; and one about a store receiving magical unicorn polish. I repeat: Bartleby Snopeswasnot a genre magazine, but it was a magazine that wasn’t afraid to get weird.

I’m a traditionalist in the sense that I prefer to work within rather than without the Literary Establishment™ to change things. Why? Because a lot of the criticism levied against it is completely valid. One of the biggest problems is the one you mentioned: We’re very uptight. We don’t want to mess with what’s established. We don’t want to take risks. We don’t want to try and take notes from the indie crowd when it comes to building up market. We act as if being able to interpret Joyce and loving the classics is the only way to enter this rarified air.

(And all of this just gives more ammo to those in the indie community who then claim we’re some sort of exclusive country club)

But these are not lofty spaces. What we do is really no different than what anyone with a passion/talent does. Success shouldn’t be defined by what you publish, awards, conferences, tenures, it should be defined by the simplest question: “Are you happy?”

And not in the blissful, okay-we-are-done-no-more-effort-required sense of happiness that’s fatal, but rather, the happiness, or rather, the satisfaction of knowing that what you do is what you want to do. That’s success. Y’all think some of these best-selling and allegedly “hack” writers give two shits that some stuffy professor with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop thinks? They enjoy what they do.

That’s success. I consider myself successful because I get to do what I like to do on the side, but success comes with a huge side helping of hunger. There are still a lot of things I want to do and am able to do and I’m just getting started. I can’t stop. My grandfather once wrote to me: “Venado que se para, lo flechan.” (The deer that stays still gets killed)

And maybe, maybe part of it is that I just don’t “get it” and it would make sense. I’ve hated most of the classics I’ve read, I didn’t study literary theory until my master’s, got a C in the last proper English class I took in undergrad, and but for a few exceptions didn’t really like the rest of my English classes. There are things I still don’t like about the approaches: such as how anything published online is automatically considered published. Sure, Sturgeon’s Law applies but it’s also a good way to grow your market versus having to order a book that even with the author’s discount comes out to $10 if you want to show someone what you’ve written. (Don’t even get me started on submission fees)

But, to be fair, that uptightness extends to those levying that criticism against the Establishment, too. Writers who can’t take criticism at all. I have seen people say, and I’m paraphrasing only a bit: “Oh I had a story that got turned down by an editor therefore all gatekeepers are snobs. I am just going to throw a few words on CreateSpace and show it to people who’ll blow smoke up my ass and flip my shit when someone gives me three stars or less on my review.”

You have to have thick skin as a writer. You’re going to get rejection after rejection. That’s good! The first one’s always a little bit jarring but after that, they get much easier. The mentality should be that rejections are the expectation and not the exception. Eventually you start wanting to get rejections because you know every rejection is an opportunity to fix something and you know that in the end it’s a numbers game. Writers need to be able to handle that. Before I landed a book deal with La Casita Grande Editores, I had emailed around 60 different queries to 60 different agents. A year from now, I won’t necessarily remember the 60 queries or that of those, only 10 agents responded, with 9 of those being a variant of “thanks but no thanks” and one “wow sounds interesting, and thanks but no thanks”. I will remember that out of a hell of a lot of nos, I had one yes. That’s all that mattered.

This, by the way, is not a dig at the agents that turned me down. If anything, I’m thankful, because that’s 60 different look-throughs and edits that improved my queries each time. And as a Latino writer, I felt that it was my responsibility to go this way, because there is another very valid criticism about the establishment: it’s too white. You don’t see a lot of us in this space of literary journals and MFA programs. So I have to challenge my fellow POC writers who are tempted to go indie to not give up on their dreams of getting published the “traditional” way for the sole reason that by retreating we give the people who don’t want to see us there win by giving them exactly what they want.

If doors are closed, you kick them open. If they won’t budge, you open a window, if the window’s closed, you find another way in. If the space is too white, what is gained by leaving? How are you going to change the system when you can’t get traction at all? I may be just one person, but I’m there. I’m there because I saw other Latino writers and poets stirring up shit inside those literary spaces. My hope is I am able to do the same for even younger POC writers. As one friend put it: We should infiltrate, not segregate. Get your name out there, start a blog, go to events, change the system from within. I think online journals are a great way to start because it puts your story out there, one that’s vetted. Don’t hide behind paywalls. Get your work out there because people need to see it.

COMPTON: Oh man I love your views on all this. I think what you just said should be put in chapbook form and handed out to all young writers at some point in their lives, like a driver’s license, like a class ring, like a diploma.

So what’s on tap for you? What’s the realistic, day to day, version of what’s next and then what would be the next thing if you had a magic wand and could just make it happen instantly? In particular, do you have anything in book form that you might be shopping around in the near future?

RODRIGUEZ: Right now, I’m finishing up the edits to my manuscript and my editor and I are hoping for publication by February of next year, with as many readings and appearances to promote it as I can get in the fall. On the individual level, I’ll do a lot of self-promotion but I’ll do my best to be mindful not to cross over into the “we get it, Hugo, you wrote a book” point. I also don’t want to be that guy on Twitter only posting links to his book because that’s going to get old and annoying real quick. However, I’m still going to be active in my social media presence. I’m mostly on Twitter @HugoEstebanRC and Facebook (www.facebook.com/DosAguilasWrites) and I post a weekly writing-related (mostly) post on my John Scalzi/Chuck Wendig-inspired blog at www.dosaguilas.org/random-strands.

What kind of stuff are you going to see there? Well, writing-related stuff, nonsensical musings about food, the occasional retweet of something political, and words of praise for heavy metal and the San Antonio Spurs.

On the other writing fronts…oh man, lots of writing ahead! I’m going to keep on writing short stories and flash pieces; I’m going to finish the edits to my poetry manuscript and start shopping that around; and finally, well, I really want to start making serious inroads into the fantasy epic that I’ve been developing over the last decade and change.

If the magic wand only applies to me and only my writing, I’d probably use it on having that genre project off the ground and at the very least having a manuscript I could start querying agents with. Like I said, it’s been about eleven years since I first came up with the original idea, and I have nothing to show for it. I’ve started to write something several times and gotten as far as 70 pages in before letting the crippling self-doubt get to me and forcing me to abandon the projects because they’re burning piles of garbage. If anyone were to read them right now I’d want them to sign a medical waiver; that way they wouldn’t have grounds to sue me after the neck injuries they’d sustain from cringing so hard.

But honestly? I want to get better, and I know I really need to just devote more time to actually getting better, devoting time to the process that I love, with all its highs and its lows. If I were to flick my wrist and poof I have a completed and non-cringy manuscript…it’d rob me of all of that, so…it’d be a really tough call.

That’s really pretty much it. I want to thank you so much for your time, and for any one interested in getting to know more, please feel free to reach out to me! I love talking to people about writing, and really, anything.

INTO THE DEEP AND INTO THE WEIRD: An Interview with Hugo Esteban Rodriguez was last modified: April 30th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

I haven’t been going out much lately. I didn’t even show up to the release party for the latest edition of be about it zine. I’ve been hermitting/hibernating and it’s been weird and maybe productive because I’m reading and writing in my little studio cave but I had been itching to go out, plus I had this idea for a new blog series about literary events that I wanted to try out, so I reached out to my poet friend Anna Avery to see if she wanted to come to this reading with me. It was at a bookstore I had never heard of or visited before, in a section of San Francisco that I don’t get out to very much. And I like both of the readers and couldn’t remember the last time I had seen either of them read.

I managed to read 75 books this year. I say managed because I’m an incredibly slow reader. In order to hit this fine number, I had to read three books at once throughout the year – one in hard copy; one on Kindle; and one in audio format. Which is okay by me. In fact, I’m beginning to prefer Kindle, especially.

I would have liked to read more books actually published during this past calendar year, but I wandered around a little and picked up some titles I’d long wanted to get my hands on (Autobiography of Red) and some older indie titles from writers I just really love reading (Barrett Warner, James Tadd Adcox).

These books are in no particular order, although I still maintain that this first one listed here was the most important title published this year.

This series is for me the biggest thing in publishing right now. Tara L. Masih‘s efforts do not get nearly enough attention in many respects, but particularly with her work editing this series. Read my full review here.

Troy James Weaver is writing with a pure heart in Marigold. His book Visions is up next for me and I hope many more to come. Also, this cover design by Matthew Revert gets my vote for the absolute best cover put out this year (all due respect and love, Ryan W. Bradley).

The Map of the System of Human Knowledge by James Tadd Adcox (Tiny Hardcore Press)

A book that covers in perfect uniqueness mathematics, philosophy, poetry, nature, history, physics, art, and more. I’d almost rather read James Tadd Adcox than eat a bowel of Corn Pops.

Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Philip K. Dick, edited by David Streitfeld (Melville House)

Philip K. Dick was mostly insane. And you need to listen to pretty much everything he said. This could be a start.

My Friend Ken Harvey by Barrett Warner (Publishing Genius)

Few people can own a phrase or sentence like Barrett Warner. There is no ordinary in his world, believe me. Everything is fresh and new.

This book might be on the list if not for my fascination with all things Donald Barthleme. But the occasional academic sprawl is well worth it for anyone who likes the literary biography.

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)

Valeria Luiselli’s third book won prizes and awards galore and had just about everybody tossing well-deserved praise in her general direction.

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt (House of Anansi Press)

I’ve been enamored with deWitt since The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor does nothing to tarnish that shine. I laughed out loud more reading this book than any other this past year. Check it out.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (Vintage)

The book that dates as older than any other on this list (published in 1999) and the only from a big house, I’ve been wanting to read Anne Carson for years and strangely hadn’t made the time. Glad I did. You will be, too. She is a master.

My Top 10 Books Read in 2016 was last modified: March 9th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton

Day 1: woke up at 5:00am to catch an early flight. Put on a v neck t-shirt featuring an all over print of kitty cats doing various things, a gray loose knit cropped sweater, new blue jeans from old navy, my signature cross cardigan, Sorel boots borrowed from Isobel O’Hare, and a winter coat with fur trim hood borrowed from Isobel O’Hare. Walk, train, plane to Chicago O’Hare, picked up by A.J. Binash, car, stopped in Madame Zuzu teahouse with A.J. to see if I could drop off a copy of I Will Always Be Your Whore [love songs for Billy Corgan] for Billy Corgan (I wasn’t allowed to), car to Wisconsin, open mic, went to sleep in sweatpants and kitty cat t-shirt.

Day 2: woke up in a puddle of sweat bc the bed I was sleeping in was directly over a heating pipe or something so I changed into a blue and white striped long sleeved v-neck. Showered and then changed into black turtleneck, black sweater tights, red wool skirt, cross cardigan, and black Oxford platforms. Performed at the Pump House in La Crosse, WI with A.J Binash, Olivia Gillingham, Tegan Daly, Thomas Tucker, and Jay Grays. Karaoke, doing dabs, not sleeping, left La Crosse, Wi at 3:30am with A.J. Binash to drive to Chicago O’Hare to get a morning flight to Toronto.

Day 3: still wearing red wool skirt, black turtleneck, black sweater tights, and cross cardigan. Changed into Sorel boots borrowed from Isobel O’Hare because they were too bulky to fit in my suitcase. Arrived at Chicago O’Hare airport around 8:30am. Sat by an outlet on the wall next to the restrooms to charge my phone. Quick and uneventful flight to Kitchner airport. Realized on arrival that Kitchner is a lot further away from the home of Stephen Thomas, my host in Toronto, than I had previously thought. 30 minute taxi ride into the Kitchner city center then 90 minute bus ride into the outskirts of Toronto and then a 90 minute car ride with John Liberty, a friend of Stephen who was kind enough to pick me up and point out local landmarks and talk local history to me on the ride. Showered at Stephen’s house, changed into maroon high-waist corduroy pants, blue oxford shirt, gray knit sweater (it’s actually black and white threads but looks gray), black oxford platforms. Performed on stage at The Great Hall with Ashley Obscura, Beach Sloth, Rachel Bell, Stephen Thomas, and Guillaume Morissette. Performed wearing the coat I borrowed from Isobel O’Hare because I felt like a character from Quadrophenia and Canada is cold. Spent the rest of the night wandering around a rave then someone’s birthday party and then went to bed after 4am.

Day 4: woke up sweating again, wearing sweatpants and gray tank top. Showered and changed into maroon high-waist corduroy pants, a light blue sweater with an image of the backs of Mickey and Minnie Mouse’s heads holding each other like they just finished making out knitted into the sweater, a thick jackety-type blue and black plaid snap button shirt, and black oxford platforms. Walked around with Beach Sloth, Astory Felix, and then Kira Michael came over to Stephen’s house and we hung out and then I got picked up by Stephen’s friend John Liberty again to get taken to the Buffalo airport after midnight.

Day 5: got to the airport and remembered that I left the Sorel boots I borrowed from Isobel O’Hare at Stephen’s house. Slept a little bit at the Buffalo airport wearing the same outfit with the blue Mickey/Minnie sweater. Changed my flight last minute because I was supposed to go home at this point but I wanted to go back to Wisconsin and I had packed enough clothes for a few extra days on the road. Plus there were several days I wore the same outfit for more than one day without changing. Flew to Chicago O’Hare and then got on a train to meet up with Carleen Tibbetts and Russell Jaffe and Jeanette Gomes. Got on a bus to Madison. Walked for an hour with suitcase and backpack to a Super 8 motel. Showered and changed into black leggings and the gray sweater. Passed out.

Day 6: can’t remember if I showered again or not but I put on a red plaid collared shirt with the light gray loose knit cropped sweater on top, the new blue jeans from old navy, and the black oxford platforms. Walked around Madison all day and got a jean jacket with tan corduroy details at a thrift store and then realized I had booked my flight for the next day out of Minneapolis and that I would have to find a way there and realized buses didn’t run frequently and that Madison is a hell of a lot further away from Minneapolis than I had previously believed.

Day 7: took a cab to a megabus pickup location outside of Madison and boarded a bus around 2:30am and got to Minneapolis at around 8:00am. Found my way to the airport and wanted to disintegrate completely. Waited around for hours at the airport for my 3:00pm flight, flew to LA and left the cleared area to go outside to smoke and then went through security again to get my flight to Oakland. Train from Oakland airport back to my neighborhood, walked home. Passed out in all of my clothes.

Alexandra Naughton goes to Wisconsin and Toronto (what I wore where) was last modified: March 4th, 2016 by Alexandra Naughton

John Washington was born in New York, raised in Ohio, living in the Arizona borderlands, with a few things in between. Currently an adjunct at the University of Arizona, teaching fiction and creative non-fiction. Also working as a freelance journalist and translator. He claims he focuses his days on his novels.

It seems that on one of the mentioned in-betweens, he decided to go down to southern Mexico. Not only did he learn the language of the locals, but actually decided to work with that language. And he lived among the locals. He lived with them and he lived them.

“The children in the playground
The people that I see
All races, all religions
That’s America to me”
-Lewis Allan and Earl Robinson “The House I Live In”

Going to the movies alone is an act that harkens back to de Tocqueville’s idea of American individualism. Everyone is in the theater for the sole purpose of escape, whether we empathize with the antihero, root for the villain or succumb to the pathos of laughter or tears, gathered in a single space, each one of us with our own memories and opinions of what we just witnessed when it’s over. I sat in an auditorium full of film students and faculty at the New School University, the only person alone to watch Killer of Sheep on a big screen, the feelings of self-consciousness forgotten as I watched the opening scene in which a pre-adolescent is scolded for not protecting his younger brother: “You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man. Start learning what life is about now, son.”

Charles Burnett, one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers alive today, studied at UCLA, birthplace of the film movement of realism told from the black American perspective that refuted the exploitation that filled the marquees at the time. The movement was America’s answer to Italy’s neo-realism, post-Rebellion Watts (i.e. a decade after early August 1965) replacing post-World War II Rome in the case of Killer. Burnett’s series of vignettes filmed in black and white and set to a catalog of popular American music spanning nearly a century focuses on Stan, a slaughterhouse worker and the peripheral characters that he and his family interact with on a regular basis. Children spin tops and play King of the Mountain and rock fights in vacant construction sites while the adults roll dice and play dominoes and cards on kitchen tables. The best-known scene is one in which Stan and a friend pool their money together to buy an engine for a car they hope to fix and sell, only for a poor decision to undo all of their work in one of the most-cringe worthy moments that is still difficult for me to watch this day.

The Quiet One

James Agee and photographer Helen Levitt first collaborated on the silent film In the Street, a non-narrative short about life on the streets of East Harlem filmed in the mid-1940s. The Quiet One, released in 1948, takes this several steps further, from children on sidewalks to the story told in narration (written by Agee) of one child, Donald Peters, a boy neglected or else abused by family who goes off to the Wiltwyck School for Boys in upstate New York, which by the time of filming was being kept afloat by donations solicited by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The film, more of a docudrama than a documentary, was an anomaly for its time simply for its focus on a black child in a poor neighborhood. It succeeds in raising the question of the role of environment in shaping the individual psyche of a child as well as the communal psyche of peoples. The scene in which Peters is beaten by his grandmother simply for existing is so starkly filmed by Levitt, so carefully worded by Agee (“The same old hopeless confusion and misunderstanding. Rage and pain and fear and hatred…and the sick quiet that follows violence. Duty without love. And peacemaking that fails.”) that it lingers in the mind long after the movie’s end.
Note: Waltwyck was closed in 1981 due to lack of funding.

Belly

From the opening sequence of a club that DMX and Nas rob to an all white mansion in Jamaica Estates, Queens to the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, Hype Williams’ feature film debut is an amalgamation of everything he learned directing music videos for the top hip hop acts of the mid to late 1990s, an era rife with the excesses of the Dot Com Boom and the airwave domination of the East Coast. Aside from the electric performance of DMX in a role that seemed written with him in mind, the movie stands alongside the works of Raymond Chandler in making me conscious of the importance of atmosphere when constructing a story through Williams’ signatures of blacklight, single color backgrounds, slow motion and sharp camera cuts. The film is also personally notable for one of DMX’s best quotes, “Fuck a book! Shorty can’t eat no books!” a line that serves as a regular reminder that even though freedom of expression is a right, writing literature is a privileged act in itself.

Bonnie and Clyde

Despite what the movie may have you believe, Clyde Barrow wasn’t impotent or gay. Rather, this was borrowed from John Toland’s novel The Dillinger Days by none other than Warren Beatty himself to play against the actor’s reputation as a Lothario, or what we would nowadays consider a sex addict. Despite this inaccuracy among others, Arthur Penn’s interpretation is made to be deconstructed and discussed, particularly for its depiction of violence considered quite graphic for 1967’s audience who watched the nightly news reports and footage of killings in Vietnam. If the entire film was the final closeup of Faye Dunaway’s sexy, knowing smile and the barrage of bullets that immediately follows I would watch it on a loop.

AN: I have always been writing. Since I was like 4 years old I have always been making up songs or writing poems and stories and putting on shows for people or imaginary friends. When I was a baby my parents put a video camera in my bedroom for an afternoon and called the video ‘Allie takes a nap.’ It’s basically an hour of me mugging for the camera and walking around in my crib and singing to myself.

I don’t think it’s something I ever really decided to do, I’ve just been doing it. Something like ten years ago I started to take this shit a bit more seriously and got more involved in getting my work published and doing readings, but honestly it all feels like a compulsion. I wrote about this feeling of being compelled to write a while ago on htmlgiant and someone commented saying ‘you’re not a writer, you have an addiction.’ And that’s chill and all. Not everyone can be like me.

The love story between a CIA operations officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center –who is also bipolar and broken– and a former US Marine Corps platoon sergeant –who was also a prisoner of war and a terrorist or former terrorist or broken– is impossible.

Welcome to Enclave

Welcome to Enclave, a community blog and internet space where the literary community can share their enthusiasm for literary & non-literary ideas, fiction, poetry, film, music, current events, and other forms of creative culture. Enclave’s contributors represent different literary communities, corners, and aesthetics but share one thing in common: the desire to express themselves openly, urgently, and without a shred of dishonesty. At Enclave, we are artists looking to share our passion for creativity and formal expression. We hope you’ll stick around. Strike up a conversation. We’re all coping here.